Our Creative Space...

Again, we have been busy like bees. I started to crochet this bag with jute string and cotton. Extremely difficult to crochet that hard string. In the end, Estella took it over and finished it.

The bag will last a life time or two, though!

During its long life the owner will feel the need to wash the lining, so we made a removable lining fastened with buttons.

The lining is a lovely vintage hand embroidered piece, with very fine details.

Is she cute...or is she cute?

I also started an other endless  bag project. The technical inspiration comes from the book Manipulating Fabric, by Colette Wolff, THE BOOK for all kind of fabric manipulations destined to obtain a 3D effect, like shirring, smocking, pleating and tucking. The book contains no finished projects, only black an white photographs and grafics of samples, it is a text book, in fact, but wonderfully well written, clear and fascinating.
More than one life time would be needed to make something out of every sample, even one sample could inspire you to a life time of projects!

This is called italian contoured smocking and consists in folding fabric in horzontal and vertical rows to create ruffled effects. I made a proof on a piece of linen woven in basket wave, to avoid the stipling of the fabric.

This is how it looks after basting the rows.

And this is how it looks after pulling the threads.

For the bag, first I made a patchwork of hand dyed fabrics. Then I discovered that I hadn't enough iron on smocking dots to stipple the fabric. I didn't want to wait weeks for the sheets of dots to arrive (no such thing where we live), so I decided to baste waste canvas to the fabric to guide the lines. It works, albeit is difficult to see.

This is all I have to show after two days of hard work!

See more creative spaces at Our Creative Spaces.